Life is a journey not a destination. Profound, hey? At the moment life is fast, it's super-charged, break-neck, on steroids fast. You notice your daughter and has grown 3 inches in the last 5 minutes and your 'puppy' now suffers from old age arthritis. What happened? Where did the time go? Feeling the strain of city life with deadlines to meet, homework to do or dog poop to pick-up, we headed to the country for some desperately needed R & R

Our rescue remedy came in the shape of an all wheel drive Ford Kuga Titanium, all shiny, new and on loan for the next six weeks. Six weeks to travel anywhere our little heart's desire as part of Kidspot Voices of 2014. Aren't we the lucky ones? Make sure you catch the next two instalments coming soon! Please grab a coffee and be our backseat driver as we journey to the countryside to a friend's horse stud 2 hours north of Sydney near Mount Vincent

Before I go on, I want to tell you a bit about the car. Sure, I'm here to inform you of the Ford Kuga's most redeeming qualities, but I wouldn't be doing so if I didn't think this was an awesome car. It's the perfect size for our small family in the city as it parallel parks by itself using Active Park Assist (yes, that's right, no hands required!), it's not too big for city sized parking stalls and it's robust enough for country life. Shhh, don't tell Ford but we took her off road on the farm to pick Australian native bush lemons growing on the hillside paddock past the creek. It tested her all-wheel drive capabilities and she didn't break a sweat

Have a peek at the video of our rural escape and the cheeky Haflinger horses on the stud ....

On our rural escape, the Haflinger horses followed our every move around the farm, I'm not exaggerating. They're more puppy than horse, up for a scratch + cuddle + nibble and were fascinated by our lemon picking to make lemon tarts for morning tea. At the end of the video you see the affectionate horse (pictured below with the crazy eyes) nibbling my stomach as he corners me up against a rock while I'm videoing his good side

The only matter of the day was avoiding horse-pies when picking the Australian bush lemons flourishing on the property (you can tell I'm a city girl) . One missed step and it was all over....your boots. Next time we bring gumboots. Having said that, it was well worth the effort to pick the lemons. Their skin is really unusual. Very bumpy texture and soft to touch almost like over whipped butter. But let me tell you about the juice... bursting with a tart/sweet flavour and a poorly aimed squeeze will squirt you from eye to navel. There were hundreds of lemons everywhere like little beacons of gold 

Here's another really, really cool feature of the Kuga Titanium that we are using daily...if you have your hands full, opening the tailgate is a breeze. Simply kick your foot under the bumper and, voila, up comes the tailgate with no hands required! We love it so much we might not give the car back

Here's the recipe for the lemon tart. You don't need native lemons and can substitute regular ones. I'm not sure you'll want to go meandering through the bush to find these but if you do.....

It was a wonderful couple of days getting back to what's important in life and that's friends and family….time to slow down and smell the hay

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